Processing logic represents the procedural steps to accomplish a process or a complex task. Processing logic modeling is a common requirement when describing a process in a structured way or in order to implement it on IT system. To improve the business process's visibility and flexibility for change, business and industries have striven to capture and streamline the business processes.
Well known workflow system has been widely used in this field. Normally it features a directed graph based flow method to describe a structured set of activities designed to produce a specific output. However, such flow model is not easy to understand if the process is complex, especially for business analyst. This brings big gap for process design between business operation level and IT implementation level.
A complex process is not easy to be decomposed to simple atomic processes due to the complicated relationship between entities of a flow model. So there is no clear composition view of key tasks of a process. Prior art includes a software product well known as WBS Chartpro available from Critical Tools, Inc.
WBS Chartpro is a project plan tooling, which could help to plan and display projects' schedule using a tree-style diagram known as a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) Chart. WBS charts display the structure of a project showing how the project is broken down into summary and detail levels. Plan new projects using an intuitive “top-down” approach or display existing Microsoft Project plans in an easy to understand diagram. Although this application takes use of tree-style diagram to describe a detailed project plan, it is not process description initiative, so it has no capability to streamline the procedure of a process.
As another example, WO 99/60372 (Apparatus and Method for Monitoring and Controlling Laboratory Information and/or Instruments) disclosed a system for facilitating the handling of laboratory information. User could select predetermined task, drag and drop in the tooling interface to build a task sequence in a tree structure, and when running the processor executes the sequence of tasks in turn by reference to the static and dynamic laboratory data. This invention is a domain specific application. Although it also features a tree-style structure to describe a processing logic, it targets to describe sequence processing in the specific domain but has no enough and necessary processing logic modeling capabilities, such as parallel processing, loop and sub-logic support.
Again an example. U.S. Pat. No. 6,092,048 (Task Execution Support System) disclosed a task execution support system which supports the user to execute a task in accordance with the progress of task process listed-up as network type flow. A task management server includes a memory unit for memorizing task information, an action entry comprising a task, an event rule and a main task and sub-task structure, and each of a plurality of client machines includes a task information display/operation unit which enables each user to operate information during a task is executed. In the modeling method in this invention, the sub-tasks structure could only be sequential, no parallel, and it's processing logic modeling tool is more like a task registration interface and has no extensive editing function.